美国信用卡拒付率上升：2021至2025年全球增46%

Max Shafkin here from Everybody's Business. Today we're sharing an episode from one of our favorite Bloomberg podcasts, The Big Take. This episode is about friendly fraud and the uptick in credit card chargebacks. It features our Business Week colleague and friend of the show, Amanda Mull. And Stacy and I will be back with a new episode of this podcast, Everybody's Business, on Friday. [music] Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Amanda Mole has been covering retail for years. She's tracked the demise of American malls, the explosion of fast fashion brands, and recently a growing sense of distrust between customers and merchants.

People feel like they're being scammed left and right.

Sneaky subscription services that are hard to get out of. Restrictive return policies. products that just don't meet expectations.

It's a consumer environment where you feel like you have less and less purchasing power, less and less ability to like talk to another human about a problem you're having. So, people look for ways to uh get back at retailers.

One of those ways is something called a chargeback. Essentially, disputing a credit card transaction. It is when you go to your credit card issuer and go, "Hey, there's a problem with this transaction or I didn't buy that or I don't recognize this. I want you to reverse the charge. I'm not paying for this."

Pushing back on a credit card charge isn't new. But Amanda found that it is happening more and more and more.

From 2021 to 2025, the rate of chargebacks in the US rose about 29% and worldwide it rose about 46%. Some of that is due to a greater number of credit card transactions overall, but most of that is because people are disputing more transactions for a variety of reasons.

Reasons that range from the legitimate,

hey, I ordered this thing online. It never showed up.

Yeah,

they are not giving me a refund, but I didn't receive the product.

To the deceptive,

yeah, I bought this, but I don't want to pay for it. So, I'm going to tell the bank that it was fraudulent, that it never arrived, that there was an issue with it, so I will just get this for free.

I'm Sarah Holder, and this [music] is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, how the rise of chargebacks is putting merchants on the defense and pulling banks into the fray and what this growing trend says about shopper psychology [music] and the health of the economy overall. For consumers, filing a chargeback can feel like a quick and easy path to getting a refund. But behind the scenes, it actually triggers what can be a long and complicated process.

The bank goes to the merchant and goes, "You have a transaction dispute. It charges them a fee, which can be, you know, 10, 15, $20 depending on the situation depending on the the vendors involved." And the bank investigates. The bank goes, "Okay, merchant, do you have a tracking number? do you have uh shipper information? Can we contact the shipper? And then a lot of times for a very inexpensive transaction on the other end of the spectrum, the bank may look and go, okay, you can have your $20 back.

This it's going to cost us $20 of labor to even start to look into this, so like we're not worried about it.

Okay. So, the rate of these chargebacks is increasing. And you looked at some of the reasons why. The biggest example being chargebacks that begin with a simple misunderstanding, what you call friendly fraud.

Yeah. So you've bought something as a consumer in what the banking industry calls uh card not present transactions. So that's like all of online shopping plus things that like feel not so much like online shopping but actually are which is like ordering an Uber, ordering Door Dash, like any anything you use an app for that like even if it summons something in real life that is a card not present transaction. If you let your teenager put your card in Apple Pay and they start using it for stuff, because card not present transactions tend to bounce through a lot of like payments vendors and third parties, what they show up as on your credit card statement is sort of anybody's guess.

So, you might look at all of those things and go, I don't recognize any of these names. Who spent $50 on the app store? Like, not me. Like, why would I do that?

And you're like, where did that charge come from? I need to dispute that charge. And then there's al also the issue of subscriptions. A lot of retailers will include 7 days free or one month free and then a recurring $12 every month that you may agree to and like it's a legitimate transaction in a legal sense, but like you missed that. It was put in a place where like it was designed for you to miss it

or you sign up for a free trial, you forget to cancel, but you meant to cancel,

right? You meant to cancel and it you look at your credit card statement and it feels like someone has stolen money from you.

Yeah. So all of these transactions are disproportionately likely to be subject to chargebacks when in reality none of those are fraud.

Chargebacks have become really easy to file. Many banking apps have a button that lets you dispute a [music] transaction. Consumers can often feel it's worth a try given that low barrier to entry and the high likelihood of getting a refund on a low dollar transaction,

especially if you have a premium credit card. um that's sort of like baked into the service where it's like okay if it's like if you're disputing $7 on the app store that you don't think you bought like that's probably just getting refunded. The credit card wants to keep you happy and also like it is a very labor and timeintensive process to investigate credit card transaction disputes. So if below a certain dollar amount and that can vary across card issuers, they just decide that like hey we're just going to honor these.

So you also talked about this other category of chargebacks where people are basically intentionally using them to get free stuff.

Yes. [laughter] Talk about this uh not so friendly fraud. How prevalent is this and how does it work?

Well, it's growing in prevalence. I would say what you see with this [music] type of of intentional sort of malfeasants is generally younger consumers. Um, you know, Tik Tok is a place where where young people go to sometimes invent classic types of fraud from first principles. And this is another one. Uh, you know, Tik Tok tries to take these down as they come up. But there's a lot of people on uh various social platforms telling you that like, oh, if you're like upset with how long shipping is taking, do a chargeback.

If you're upset with how long it's taking them to like approve your return, do a chargeback. If you

weird trick to get your money back is

is fraud. God. [laughter]

Yeah.

But what you're describing is that, you know, in in part this could be a nefarious impulse to get one over on a retailer. And in part, it's responding to this feeling that consumers have that, you know, inflation is rising. Companies are shrinking the size of their products and charging the same price. There is this feeling among consumers, I think, that they're getting scammed. whether or not those scams are legally actionable.

Having subscription fees baked into everything in a way that like is constantly surprising and that is hard to opt out of is like a bad consumer experience. It feels like being stolen from even if you as a company, you as a merchant followed the letter of the law. like getting rid of your customer service agents in order to divert everybody to an AI bot um that like can't answer specific questions about non-standard policy issues. like that feels like you are being um as a consumer sort of shunted into a system designed to keep your money um even when something has gone wrong and you deserve some sort of redress or just want to talk to a person like

when you are spending your paycheck like you were supposed t